It's going along pretty well, we just sort of gave our, I don't know if you'd say fifty percent presentation or maybe, maybe more like seventy-five, um....we'd passed in our, our proposal for final design last class, so, yeah, it seems like it's going really great.

Which is why I got in so much trouble when they had that bicycle contest that no one else wanted to go and I went, they had to send the older kids up to get me in order to be there, so, they didn't appreciate that much.

There was very little mobility. People had lived there for a generation or two, you know and, and um, um, my whole childhood growing up in the neighborhood, I can only remember one or two families that moved in or moved out over that time, which is very very different, from, from now, when families move in every year, you know

The same people at the beginning were there at the end except for one or two people, you know? And, so that, is I think one big difference, I, I don't think there's that same coherence or, or continuity now that there was then.

Another thing that was very different about the neighborhood then, that is so different now, I notice it now because I, I live in the same neighborhood, now. Is that ah, uh, you couldn't drive down a street without having to wait for all the kids who were playing on the street to get off the street, ok. Now, there are no kids playing on the street, like there's none of that, it's very different, there was, we were in the middle of the baby boom, so every family had two or three or four or five kids in it. And they all belonged to different groups in the same neighborhood by age, but everyone was out playing on the street or in the schoolyard.

Ok, you don't see that anymore, everyone is involved in organized, individual activities now. The only organized activity we had then was that their was, uh maybe Little League, only, and only a couple kids were in that.

So, our parents weren't Italian and Irish immigrants, although some were, mostly it was our grandparents who had immigrated, because when we were born, immigration in the United States had been pretty much closed since the '20s. So, it was our parents' parents who had, but we still all maintained very strong ethnic identities,

The Irish kids in our neighborhood, very strong Irish ethnic background, and the Italians, very strong Italian, Italo-American cultural traditions that we all maintained. And um, I don't know, is that sort of like an answer to you....

My, my father was a doctor, and he was on the staff of the Central hospital, which was only a block away from us. Central hospital was halfway between us and the central theater, or more close, closer to us, which is where I was born and most of the people in my neighborhood were born right in that hospital, right in the, right in the neighborhood. My father delivered most of the people in the neighborhood, there was mostly, aside from my father, I think it was a ninety-five percent, ninety-nine percent blue collar neighborhood.

I know this is sort of a, a tough question, but, I just, when just talking to other people, the fact that it was working class, there weren't, this is just an example, there weren't very many cars, so that's why a lot of people went to, to the Central Theater, or also, it was, um, there's a lot of families living there, so, it was a very f-, I, I've noticed that it is a family oriented movie theater. Is there anything along those lines that you could sorta see?

And it would be in Boston, my Mother used to take me to the, the, the big fancy movie theaters in Boston, and back then the theaters in Boston were huge movie palaces, really, really, elaborate things, and so that was a big social occasion. We did not go to the movies with our parents at the Central Theater.

We went with our, strictly with our age group. And as I said, we had a number of age groups in our neighborhood, my age group was very distinct from the age group of the kids 2 or 3 years older than, than us, and the kids 2 or 3 years younger than us. Ok.

Uh, that's very different today. Because we didn't participate in organized activities, like going to soccer team, going to dancing classes, going to music classes, because we didn't do those sorts of things, uh, we, would, I guess, go to the theater as a group, in lieu of some of those organized activities.

I mean, some of us had dancing, some of like my sister went to dancing school, if you did anything you'd go to little league or go to dancing school, or some. But they were very few organized after-school activities at all.

And ah, and the Central Theater, going to the theater was not an evening thing with the family during the week. It was a Saturday thing, definitely a Saturday thing. As I grew older into my adolescence, and started dating, if you were going on a Friday night date, the Central Theater, you know you'd go to the, either the Somerville, or into Boston, 'cause you wanted to do something classier than go to the local neighborhood theater. You know, so, I don't know if that's any kind of an answer.

So the theater on Saturday afternoon would be filled with kids, no adults at all. You know, we'd be, and uh, on, I guess the adults, when they used to go to the theater, would go during the week and the evening, yeah.

Those are great and we get new release notices all the time. So in July when our new budget comes in, we get, every week I get a new release memo

Vida

Well I haven't even told you. I have been having twice now. [by criteria once for an essay on a new DVD and the second for solaris the other cd and I probably get out my colleague and I have written the script and are doing the voice over commentary]

I, I, that wasn't part of our neighborhood hangout area, since it was just a few blocks away down Central Street, so I don't really know, all I know that, just that their used to be a mom & pop store, uh, variety store across the street, where I used to walk up, it used to be a big thing to walk up from my house by himself up to there to and buy the latest superman comic book as it came in, for ten cents at the mom and pop store.

And, there used to be a submarine sandwich shop that I used to go to too, right in the same, right next to the theater, there, and, that was pretty cool but I don't think that came until the '60s, early '60s.

Yeah, I guess, I guess that was it, that's um, my, I guess I'm sorta focusing on my final project j-, just sort of the structure of the building itself, and then, and then also the structure of the, of the neighborhood. So...

And as I said before, it had a balcony, but we would never g-, they would not, sometimes let us in the balcony. We would try and sit in the front row, and as I said before, that, that was sort of, the wrong thing to do because they would always at, they would, when we got rowdy they would throw us out from the front row back and we never learned to, to sit in the back instead of, instead of sitting in the front.

Um, what about...I, I, I remember they had a stage there, you know with curtains in front of the, the screen. We'd never saw a live show that, that would have events like the drawings for the contests, and things up on the, up on the stage.

Sound system in the film, the theater was always good, I never had a, a problem with that. We never had problem hearing, except for the noise we made, but um....it was, films never weren't breaking down or something, they kept it in good shape

You had to go in the lobby, buy your ticket in the lobby, and right across from the ticket counter was the uh, um, concession stand, but what we did do as I said before was, like, sort of take cups from inside the soda machine that was right there, that was a trick we learned from the older kids and, we did that for awhile, something that got us into trouble a couple times, yeah.

It's really nostalgic just to go back and remember those days, it was definitely a, an important part of my childhood, and that was something we used to love doing so much - the Saturdays at the, at the movies.

That's what I remember, uh, the only other social thing we were doing that it right in the corner area, yeah. It was a big fancy building, and um, course by the '70s and '80s it wasn't so big and fancy, wasn't so fancy anymore.

Well, The American Legion is up the street on the left. As you, as you cross the street, it's a, it's, it's, it's right next to a church, about a block up on, on, on the left. Host 19 I think you mean?

It's still very, very strong, it's a, it's a, it's a strong post it was always in the lead in the neighborhood for, for sponsoring events in the neighborhood, for spon-, for sponsoring the local sports teams, they sponsored their own baseball team.

So, uh, as a matter fact my wife, once she graduated from Tufts, after she graduated from Tufts, lived in apartment across the street from American Legion and we used to date when she lived there, so, we, but by then the theater had long been closed.